Connections/Virtuosity

I'm Michael Gallagher. I'm in charge of painting conservation here at the Museum. What I'd like to talk about is virtuosity...

virtuosity being a display of skill, of brilliance. In acting, music, singing, sport

even, I've always been attracted to the people who can take something to another level.

I find great museums and art galleries almost as a type of theatre.

I don't like to think of them as treasure houses. I think if you go in with the right attitude, it is an interactive experience looking at an object.

There are examples where simple displays of skill become a little empty,

but sometimes, the celebration of the skill and its display takes the object to another level and is intrinsic to its meaning.

This helmet of the 16th century is intended to be a show piece. It wasn't what some soldier popped on to go off to war.

It's celebratory of his skills, it's also celebratory of a certain militarism. There's something wonderfully operatic about the whole thing.

For me, the Studiolo is particularly compelling. I think you are very aware that this is not just skillful decoration.

The warmth of the wood, the

wonderfully composed and naturalistic

niches full of objects and it's the amazing skill

in creating this naturalism in a highly artificial way. And you could have painted that room, but where would've been the fun in that, when could kill yourself creating it out of fruit woods.

This was one of the very first paintings I worked on when I came to the Museum. I find it incredibly beautiful. It does display a bravura technique.

It's not about naturalism. He would of had no problem describing the anatomy of a woman, but no one has a shoulder like that. And when you get in close

he uses this little tiny highlight on the nose and then the lip and then the chin and then there's a little set of swatches of pale pink on the cheek to describe the quality of light on the face. It's like a virtuoso musical performance

where the ability to throw in that extra at the right moment turns the painting into poetry.

I'm not alone in finding this one of my favorite objects. There's not much of it. It's very clearly and brutally a fragment and just being left with the lips, it's an impossibly sensual object. This uncompromising yellow and the skill of the sculptor working stone to this degree is utterly amazing.

The earthenware, Figure of a female dancer, through the skill of the artist, materials are transformed.

Even if you'd never seen representations of that form of dance, you would sense something courtly, slow, unbelievably elegant, and the contrast between simplicity of the material representing very, very simply but really quite magically, silk garments.

The head of a king from the 4th century Iran commands a sort of interaction. It speaks of kingship, of control, of something superhuman, and the skill in creating it makes it relevant today.

One of the great privileges of being a painting conservator is the intimacy that is a natural part of what we do. You have to look at it very closely as a work of art and to let it speak to you in those terms. This painting by Velázquez, it has an honesty that is really striking.

It's very much an interrogation. The sense of a slightly moist skin and there's a sort of vein running under the forehead. Because you have that extraordinary facility in the handling of paint it almost seems self-evident.

I think there has to be some connection beyond mere facility to take the object somewhere else in terms

of poetry and artistry.